the snow keeps drifting down covering every aspect other than its cold white breath.

my lungs forget how to empty and each indrawn breath is colder, sharper, bringing singular awareness one by one my fingers and toes are growing numb.

Yet as I approach another slippery intersection millions of tiny birds skid out of the sky-space that connect the clouds.

Their hot energy is like pepper dust. It catches my throat propels a sneeze gusts of fury sheer vertical as if to catch the centre empty of bodies empty air

the heart beat of an instant direction change.

Poetry has always been important to me. You will have noticed I haven't posted here regularly and that is because I don't write much anymore but I have decided this is a good place to share some of my work that was written before. So technically not recent work but work that I am proud of, none the less, and which has not been shared before. Archives sounds far to lofty and old files seems to dusty but I hope you enjoy reading my words, and that in some way they speak to you.

As well as reading and writing poetry I sometime find a terrific reference book that reminds me about how to read and think through poetry. I always find it stimulating to go back to analysis and think it through then try to apply it to other work I love. The most recent book was only published last year 2015 and is by a fabulous poet in her own right as well as being a master of analysis that doesn't feel invasive, or corrosive . By that I mean it doesn't make you hate that you are reading about the meaning of said words... you are part of the process and it is exciting to think about words and how they are, have, and will continue to elaborate all the things we cannot know for certain.

"Ten Windows How Great Poems Transform the World", by Jane Hirshfield

I have been journalling about windows and photos and Hirshfield writes this about windows and poems....

"Many good poems have a kind of window moment in them---- they change their direction of gaze in a way that suddenly opens a broader landscape of meaning and feeling. Encountering such a moment, the reader breathes in some new infusion, as steeply perceptible as any physical window's increase of light, scent,or air. The gesture is one of lifting, unlatching, releasing; mind and attention swing open to new-peeled vistas."

The pleasure of reading this book is about learning better how to see the poem. NOW I will have to put my brain to work to see if anything new finds its way into language. But I leave you with this.

Basho perhaps the greatest write of haiku wrote in one of his travel journals: